More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Past and future? Yin and Yang? Donny and Marie?
Mother Mucca had been right from the beginning: “That angel dust’ll fuck you up every time!”
It will and it did, thought Mona. It will and it did.
I am twisted beyond recognition, beyond redemption. There are no longer laws that apply to me. Only a miracle could save me now.
She walked back to the empty parlor in a glazed stupor and placed a phone call to 28 Barbary Lane.
“Madrigal.”
“Thank God!”
“Who is this, please?”
“It’s me, Mrs. Madrigal. Mona.”
“Child! Where are you?”
“Oh, God! Winnemucca!”
Silence.
“Mrs. Madrigal?”
“Are you all right, dear?”
“Well, I’m … No, I feel like shit.”
“Are you … are you at the Blue Moon?”
Mona began to whimper. “How did you know?”
“Mona, I—”
“How did you know?”
“The question, dear, is how did you know?”
“How did I know what?”
“About … Winnemucca?”
“I’m cracking up, Mrs. Madrigal.”
“Please, Mona. I would have told you earlier—”
“Told me what?”
“I was so afraid you’d hate me for it, for running off and leaving—”
“I didn’t run off! I needed space. I told you that in the—”
“Not you, dear. Me.”
“What? You haven’t run off. What in the world are you talking about?”
Silence.
“Mrs. Madrigal?”
“It looks like we’d better take this from the top, dear. Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sit down, then. I’ve got a little story to tell you.”
Acapulco Blues
IT WAS DUSK ON BOARD THE PACIFIC PRINCESS. MICHAEL sat in a deck chair, smoking a joint and watching the gentle, seductive curve of the beach at Acapulco. The air was warm, and the sky was exactly the color it should have been.
Even before he got stoned.
“Mouse?” It was Mary Ann. Dressed for a date.
“Hi,” said Michael.
“I’ve looked all over for you.”
“I’se heah, Miz Scahlett.”
She pulled up a deck chair and sat on the edge of it. “Are you all right, Mouse?”
He nodded. “I’m always all right.”
“You weren’t at dinner.”
He patted his stomach. “Chubbette.”
“Burke and I thought you might … We’d really like it if you came into town with us tonight. Somebody told us about this place called BabyO’s.”
“Thanks. I don’t think I’m up for that tonight.”
“It’s a disco.”
“Maybe tomorrow, O.K.?”
She brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “Are you sure?”
He nodded as her hand slid down the side of his face. His cheek was wet. She sat with him for almost a minute, holding his hand, saying nothing.
“You better go,” he said finally. “I’m O.K.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, Mouse.”
He shrugged. “If I don’t do it, who will?”
“Mouse, you’re the most wonderful—”
“I know, Mary Ann. I know I’m a nice guy. I really do. I know that you love me. I know that old ladies love me and my mother and dogs and cats … and every goddamn person I meet except someone who’ll commit himself to … Please, don’t get me started.”
“Mouse, I wish you could—”
“The hell of it is, I know the answer. The answer is that you never, ever, rely on another person for your peace of mind. If you do, you’re screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to—I don’t know—you have to learn to live with yourself. You have to learn to turn back your own sheets and set a table for one without feeling pathetic. You have to be strong and confident and pleased with yourself and never give the slightest impression that you can’t hack it without that certain goddamn someone. You have to fake the hell out of it.”
“You aren’t faking it, Mouse. You are strong.”
“I’m tired of it. I’m sick of picking up the pieces and marching bravely onward. I want things to work out just once.” He rubbed the corner of his eye, smiled suddenly, and shrugged. “I wanna do a Salem commercial with a Marlboro Man.”
Mary Ann squeezed his hand. “We’re all that way, Mouse.”
“I know, but it works out for some people.”
“It’ll work out for you.”
“No it won’t.”
“Mouse …”
“I want it too badly, Mary Ann. Any idiot can see that. When you want it too badly, no one wants you. No one is attracted to that … desperation.”
He turned away from her, wiping his eyes.
“Christ!” he said softly, reaching for her hand again. “Look at that sky, will you?”
After Mary Ann and Burke had left, Michael spent half an hour in his stateroom reading another chapter of the Isherwood book, then wandered out onto the deck again.
The lights of the city blinked at him beguilingly.
But why should I? he wondered. Why should I put my heart through the wringer again? Who could I find that would possibly matter on a two-day stay in an unfamiliar foreign city?
And should I wear the pink or the green Lacoste?
The taxi driver had a huge white mustache and a jovial, grandfatherly face. Michael hated to ask him.
“Uh … do you know any gay places?”
The driver blinked, puzzled. “Red light?”
“No, not red light. Men.”
“Men?”
“Sí.”
“Ah, homosex!”
“Sí.”
The driver peered over the seat and studied his passenger for several seconds. “Homosex,” he repeated, then turned his eyes back to the road.
The Man in White
THE ROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN WAS POORLY LIT. MICHAEL caught only rough impressions of dusty foliage and black palms, shabby stucco houses that cowered under the headlights like illicit lovers trapped in the flash of a detective’s camera.
The cab stopped at a blocky white building with a central archway. Iron grillwork over the entrance spelled out SANS SOUCI.
Without care, Michael translated. Without care in Acapulco in a gay bar with a French name on a night when nothing in the world made any goddamn sense at all. He realized now, with some embarrassment, that he had laid the heaviest of trips on Mary Ann. She had glimpsed his soul at its blackest, devoid of humor, poisonous with self-pity. She had seen beyond the brave Disney elf, and the sight couldn’t have been pretty.
He paid the driver and walked through the archway, nodding to an old woman sweeping the floor. She returned the greeting without expression. Michael wondered if she had a word for gringo fag.
The archway led to a rear terrace overlooking another hillside and a chunk of the bay. There was a thatched bar at one end of the terrace where an old man seemed to serve as both sentinel and bartender. The whole scene was so shadowy that Michael tripped on a chair while making his entrance.
Recovering his cool, he looked around the terrace for witnesses to his clumsiness. There were none. The place was empty. The only sounds were the skeletal rattle of palms along the hillside and the sepulchral wail of Donna Summer singing “Winter Melody.”
Something was gravely wrong.
Or maybe not. Maybe this was exactly the way a gay bar in Mexico was supposed to look. Or there might have been a language problem with the cabby? No. What else could “homosex” mean? A joke, then? A macho prank on a simple American pervert?
It was half-past nine when Michael ordered a Dos Equis from the old man and sat down at a table on the edge of the terrace. He lost himself for several minutes in the onyx shine of the bay, the huge illumi
Several people straggled onto the terrace. Women. Lesbians? A man appeared. He was decked out in spray-on white pants, several dozen gold chains and a patent-leather Latin Lover hairdo right out of GQ. In L.A., he would have been straight. But here …?
The man began to boogie by himself, rolling his eyes back like a corpse that had died in copulation. His movements were the tip-off for Michael. He didn’t stop at limp wrists; he had limp ankles.
By eleven o’clock the dance floor was packed. The crowd, for the most part, was nellie, though Michael spotted a coterie of pseudo-lumberjack numbers watching the proceedings with ill-concealed amusement. He made a point of avoiding them. If they were San Franciscans, he didn’t want to know about it. He didn’t want to meet on a mountainside in Mexico someone he might have gone down on in the back room of the Jaguar Book Store.
A man asked him to dance. Michael accepted, feeling awkward and insincere. He didn’t want to dance, really; he wanted to be held.
“First time?” asked his partner, shimmying half-heartedly. He was Mexican.
“Yes,” said Michael, making a conscious effort not to speak in broken English. He usually did that when confronted with foreigners.
“You unhappy, I think?”
Michael tried to smile. “I’m sorry. I—”
“It’s O.K. Sometimes … me too.”
Damn, thought Michael. Don’t be nice. If you’re nice, I’ll cry all over you. “I’m happy most of the time, really, but sometimes …” He gave up trying to explain it and fell back on a bar cliché he never would have used in California. “Do you come here often?”
When the answer came, Michael was only half listening.
His eyes were glued to the archway, where a tall blond man in a white linen suit was watching the dance floor. Out of ancient habit, Michael cruised him for a fraction of a second, then he stopped with all the abruptness of a dog that had caught its own tail.
It was Jon Fielding.
Playing Games
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN BRIAN WAS SURE SHE WAS following him.
His imagination conjured her up in the oddest of places: in laundromats on Saturday mornings, on crowded cable cars and empty escalators, in darkened movie houses when he was ripped on Colombian.
It usually started with a look. A heavy-lidded glance. A private wink. A slow, sardonic smile that devoured him from head to foot. He was used to that, of course, but before, it had meant something different.
Before, it had meant a conquest, his conquest, a simple, uncomplicated adventure that remained under his control from beginning to end.
But now …
Now it could be someone who knew full well his dependence on her.
Now it could be Lady Eleven.
And she could be the one in control.
The question that plagued him remained the same: If she knew who he was, if she knew where to find him … why wouldn’t she want to get it on with him?
Maybe, of course, she had tried to do exactly that. Maybe she had checked out 28 Barbary Lane in the same way he had searched for her at the Superman Building. His name, he reminded himself, had never been displayed on the mailbox.
Even so, she could have asked. Mrs. Madrigal would have told her, for Christ’s sake! Maybe Mrs. Madrigal had told her and had forgotten to tell him that …
On the other hand, there could be something terribly wrong with her. Maybe she was afraid for him to meet her and thereby discover that she was … what? Crippled? Insane? Blind? Right, Brian. Blind people always keep a pair of binoculars handy.
Then again, she could be somebody famous, a local celebrity who couldn’t afford the notoriety of an overt sexual liaison. Or a Hite Report volunteer doing free-lance research? Or a lesbian trying to reform, one step at a time? Or a porno star practicing for her big scene?
Or an All-American cunt trying to drive Brian Hawkins right up the wall.
That night, as they undressed in front of their windows, Brian decided to try a new approach. He stripped to his boxer shorts, but kept his cock out of sight. Leaving the binoculars on the window sill, he folded his arms across his chest and waited.
Lady Eleven watched him through the binoculars, then mimicked his stance.
Brian counted to twenty and lifted his binoculars.
Lady Eleven did the same.
It’s a chickenshit game, he thought. We’re a couple of bratty kids playing copycat. All right, bitch! Let’s see if you can handle this one!
He left the window and ran to the kitchen, returning with a large brown paper bag. He tore open the bag and flattened it. Using a Magic Marker, he wrote seven digits on the poster-size banner.
928-3117
Then he held it up to the window, watching Lady Eleven’s reaction through the binoculars. She stood frozen for several seconds, finally lifting the binoculars to study the inscription. She held that position for a long time.
Suddenly—God almighty!—she walked away from the window, and came back moments later holding a telephone. Brian lunged for his own phone, instantly grateful he had ordered the model with an extension cord.
They were both in position now, once again duplicates of each other.
Brian watched her through the binoculars. In the conch-shell pinkness of her room, her robed body seemed to pulse with warmth. He knew what she smelled like—the sweet, grassy scent of her wet hair, the smoldering musk of her breasts …
Oh, Jesus, she was dialing!
One … two … three … four … five … six … seven.
Brian’s phone rang.
He lifted the receiver gently, fearful of frightening her. “Hello,” he said, in a calm, well-modulated voice.
Silence.
“Look, if you’d just give me your phone number, we could … I could call you sometime … that’s all.” He could hear her breathing now. He could watch her standing mute by the phone.
“Hey … tell me your name, then … just your first name, if you want. I’m a nice guy … I swear. Christ! Don’t you think this is a little weird?”
The breathing grew louder. At first, he thought she was toying with him, taunting him with sexy noises. Then he realized she was crying.
“Hey … I’m sorry, really. I didn’t mean it to sound like—”
She hung up on him. He watched her sink into a chair and crumple into a tight little knot of despair. Half a minute later she stood and closed the curtains.
Brian pulled up a chair and sat watching her window until he fell asleep.
Kinfolks
MONA’S CONVERSATION WITH MRS. MADRIGAL took forty-five minutes. When it was over, she left her cubicle and wandered out into the desert. About a hundred yards from the house a discarded truck seat offered her a sheltered refuge.
She sat down and watched the midnight sky for several minutes, half-way believing that a flying saucer would appear there to take her away from this hideous, surreal landscape.
In San Francisco now the hills would be green—a delicate shade of celadon—and soft as the fuzz on a deer’s antlers. There would be daffodils in Washington Square and purple pleroma trees on Barbary Lane and dozens and dozens of calla lillies stoically bracing themselves for Michael’s annual impression of Katharine Hepburn.
And her father would be there! Her father, her mother, her best friend and her landlady, all rolled into one joyful and loving human being!
She sprang from the truck seat and ran back to the lodge, her heart pounding with anticipation, her brain almost short-circuiting on hope. Who needed a flying saucer? Like Dorothy of Oz, she had only to click her heels three times to find her way back to Auntie Em.
Without a moment’s pause, she flung open the door of Mother Mucca’s room, completely unintimidated by the old woman’s crabbiness.
The madam was brushing her hair. “Can’t you knock?”
“Mother Mucca … Oh, I’m sorry, but I …” She le
A look of concern furrowed the old woman’s brow. “Are you O.K., Judy?”
“No. Not Judy. Mona.”
“Don’t you call me that, dolly.”
“I’m not, Mother Mucca. I’m saying my name’s not Judy. It’s Mona. Mona Ramsey … the same as yours.”
Mother Mucca glared at her briefly, then turned her gaze back to the mirror and resumed brushing. “I told you about that angel dust, dolly.”
“Mother Mucca, I haven’t—”
“If I catch you smokin’ in the house, you’re out on your ass, Judy!”
Mona regained her composure and tried to reason with her. “Look, I know you can’t believe it. I can hardly believe it myself. It’s like a … well, it’s like a miracle, Mother Mucca. Some invisible cosmic force brought us together because we need each other, because we—”
“Look, dolly, if ya don’t mind—”
“I’ll get my bag! I’ll show you my … well, I can’t show you any ID’s, come to think of it. I promise you that’s my name. I told you my name was Judy because I … I was a little embarrassed about working here and all … Please, just answer one question for me.”
“Go on … git!”
“Not until you answer this.”
“I said—”
“What was your little boy’s name?”
“What the hell do you think you’re …?”
“What was his name?”
Mother Mucca picked up the house phone on her vanity. “I’m callin’ Charlene, Judy.”
“Mona!”
“You’re so plumb pitiful I don’t even—”
Mona jerked the phone out of her hand. “Listen to me! I love you, goddammit! It was Andy, wasn’t it? Your son’s name was Andy!”
A stunned silence, then: “Who told you that?”
“Who do you think? Charlene? Marnie? Bobbi, maybe? You never told anyone, did you? It must’ve hurt too much to talk about him.” Mona caught her breath, then sank to her knees, taking the old lady’s hands in hers. “Mother Mucca … he told me. Andy told me. I live with him in San Francisco … and he’s my father.”